Labour Campaign for Trans Rights launch

Submitted by AWL on 12 February, 2020 - 11:19 Author: Natalia Cassidy
LCTR

On 10 February, the Labour Campaign for Trans Rights (LCTR) constituted itself as an online presence and released a launch statement and a series of 12 pledges for Labour supporters to sign up to.

This is a campaign launched by trans and non-binary Labour Party supporters with the aim of shifting the terrain within the party on the question on trans rights, educating activists on issues of transphobia and bigotry as well as seeking to shift Labour Party policy on support for trans rights and on issues around trans healthcare in particular.

The campaign only exists in online form as it stands, but there will now be a drive to organise a physical launch meeting at which a committee can be elected and perspectives and questions of strategy and tactics can be discussed more substantially than online organisation allows for.

The campaign is not without its problems. Pledges 10 and 12, which call for the NEC to rule out motions deemed to be transphobic and for transphobic individuals to be expelled, are a cause for concern. They are indicative of a wider trend within the left of an over-reliance on bureaucratic manoeuvering and empowering structures over which lay members have no control and which could very easily be used against the left.

It is not for the party machine to determine which activists or which motions cross an undetermined line of bigotry. It is our duty as activists to defeat bad ideas with better ideas.

We cannot hope to change society more widely and win people over to liberatory ideas and politics if we are so reliant on bureaucratic methods of defeating bad politics in our own movement.

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